Diana, 'Uncle James' Hewitt and the emotional wounds that haunt Harry: Fascinating psychological insight into the forces that shaped the playboy Prince

Ever the man of action, Prince Henry of Wales arrived in the world at 4.20pm on Saturday September 15, 1984, a full nine days ahead of schedule.

His father, who had stayed at his wife’s side throughout the nine-hour labour, giving her lumps of ice to suck and applying cream to her dry lips, afterwards emerged to tell the waiting crowds that the baby had light blue eyes ‘and a bit of, er, brownish hair’.

The next day, the Prince of Wales accompanied mother and child home to Kensington Palace before disappearing to Windsor, where his polo team-mates toasted the new arrival with vintage champagne.

Prince Charles was once heard to remark that he had learned his royal role ‘the way a monkey does — by watching its parents.’

It’s not, I believe, an approach his second-born has followed.

If and when Harry becomes a father himself, he is unlikely to put a baby through what I — as a journalist travelling with Charles and Diana — witnessed in the spring of 1985, when he accompanied his parents on a royal tour to Italy.

Aged just nine months, the young prince screwed up his tiny face in fear at the sight and sound of the crowds, despite his mother’s hope that the experience might, even at such a tender age, help him get used to them.

In private, though, he revealed his adventurous side from a very early age, his mother referring to him as ‘my danger-loving Harry’.

By the age of 14 months he had already sat on a pony for the first time, howling with rage and frustration when he was not allowed to take the reins on his own.

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And six weeks before his second birthday, he leapt from a kitchen table at Kensington Palace, sustaining injuries which required several stitches.

Staff were sworn to secrecy, with even servants at Buckingham Palace unaware of the incident.

But Harry himself was proud to display his war wounds at the Westminster Abbey wedding of his uncle Prince Andrew in July 1986, nodding enthusiastically when fellow guests suggested that perhaps he might want to be a parachutist when he grew up.

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Loving: Prince Harry pictured with Diana on the balcony at Buckingham Palace for Trooping the Colour in 1987

‘Harry was fearless, even as a toddler,’ said one of his former protection officers.

‘His mother would want to know how he had acquired the scratches and bruises he picked up, but all I could tell her was “Boys will be boys”.’

‘You never knew quite what to expect with Harry,’ adds another former royal protection officer, Ken Wharfe.

‘Right from the start, he showed signs of enjoying danger.

‘He used to come to me in a little camouflage outfit somebody had given him — he never took it off — and ask me for assignments, just like a real soldier.

‘On one occasion, I lent him a two-way police radio and told him to go and report to his aunt, Jane Fellowes, who lived close by, well within the palace grounds. He duly did and radioed in: “Ken, this is Harry reporting. Assignment complete.”

On ceremony: Princess Diana and a young Prince Harry ride together in an open top carriage

‘I then told him to go to the police officer on the gate and report back to me when he got there — but he didn’t call.’

After a few failed attempts to contact the young prince on his radio, Wharfe began to get worried.

‘Eventually he came in with the “Ken, this is Harry” call sign.

Harry the brave: Even as a schoolboy, Prince harry, pictured centre, showed a sense of adventurer

‘“Wow, Harry,” I said. “Where on earth are you?” because I could hear traffic in the background.

‘Needless to say, my feet didn’t touch the ground as I ran to fetch him from the pavement on Kensington High Street, where he’d ended up.’

‘We worried about him a little,’ says a former teacher at his pre-prep school, Wetherby, in West London.

‘He always did what he wanted, with no fear of the consequences. When I warned him about walking in front of oncoming cars, he simply sniffed and said he wasn’t bothered because they weren’t allowed to knock him down.’

But despite his lack of physical fear, the young prince suffered severe mental anguish during the painful disintegration of his parents’ marriage.

Although Charles and Diana did their best to shield their sons from marital discord, say friends, Harry was highly sensitive to atmosphere, suffering long and exhausting screaming fits that could be calmed only by his brother.

When his parents finally announced their separation in 1992, it was Harry, then eight, who begged repeatedly to know if there was anything he could do ‘to make Mummy and Daddy happy again’.

Devoted to both of them, he had been found crying in the garden at Sandringham one Christmas after the split, sobbing to an estate worker that he was missing his mother.

But insiders say that as a young child he was, if anything, even closer to Charles, with whom he would spend hours in the garden at Highgrove.

Happy: Prince Harry was devoted to both of his parents. The family are pictured on Prince William's first day at Eton College in 1995

And he was mesmerised by the film Zulu, which he watched for the first time with his father.

The film told the story of a small band of British soldiers who had defeated thousands of Zulu warriors at Rorke’s Drift in South Africa more than 100 years earlier.

The theme ignited a fire in the mind of young Harry — and from that moment he decided he wanted to taste such an adventure too.

Since the age of two, Harry had been fascinated by ‘Granny’s soldiers’, as he called them, and he relished every opportunity to chat to his father about his growing fondness for all things military — especially as he couldn’t talk to his mother about it, given her vehement opposition to an Army future for her sons.

Horse sense: A young Prince Harry and Major James Hewitt out riding

Diana’s one-time lover James Hewitt — who was, as I will reveal next week, a profound early influence on Prince Harry — claims she once told him she would never be able to live with the thought of her sons being sent away to war.

‘She said it wouldn’t be fair to her as a mother,’ he records.

‘I pointed out that all soldiers had mothers. She was silent for a bit, and then said that her sons were special because they were the only men in her life.’

By the age of 10 Harry was showing signs of increasing anxiety.

A psychiatrist to whom Diana poured out her woes tells how they discussed the damage her increasingly complex private life might be doing to her boys.

‘I told her this would not be good for them, particularly for Prince Harry, who was already a fighter, and that this might well affect him in later years. From what she told me, he was already starting to rebel.

‘She said he loved his father and admired James Hewitt, but it was obvious from what she told me that when other men came along, he started to get not just confused but angry.

'She was especially worried that Harry was showing signs of the kind that can lead in adult life to aggression and addictions of various kinds.’

It was timely advice. When Diana’s infamous Panorama interview with Martin Bashir was screened a year later, Harry became more and more furious as he learned things about his family that he could never have imagined possible.

Did their mother really make herself vomit because of their father’s behaviour with ‘Auntie PB’, as they called Camilla?

Did people really believe their mother was stupid because she hadn’t passed any O-levels?

Did Daddy’s friends really say that she should be put in a home for unstable people because she was ‘a basket case’?

Was she really having an affair with ‘Uncle James’? Had she really lied to them that the Aids patients she took them to meet were suffering from cancer?

His mother had not told them a fraction of this, and she should not have told the world. He loved his mother, but he loved his Papa too, and he was livid with Bashir for asking such personal questions.

Destined to be a soldier: Prince Harry listens to a briefing before going out on patrol through the deserted town of Garmisir in Helmand Province

Less than two years later, it was Harry, say those close to him, who suffered the most from the death of Diana in August 1997.

William’s emerging good looks and academic superiority were always, at that stage, going to make life smoother for him. Harry was his mother’s son, with her charged emotions and many of her anxieties.

Harry had been asleep in a room next to his brother’s at Balmoral when a red-eyed Prince Charles came in to break the dreadful news.

‘Is Mummy really dead, Daddy?’ were, Charles recalls, the first words the boy managed between sobs. It was a phrase the young boy would repeat many more times that day in the face of senior family members’ apparent indifference to the tragedy.

Finding it hard to believe that his mother had not merely been injured, he begged to be allowed to help bring her home.

One troubled year and two days after Diana’s death, Harry joined his brother at Eton.

Going out of his way to demonstrate that he was just one of the boys — when he clearly was not — he did not instantly endear himself to his contemporaries, and initially found it hard to make friends.

He won many of them over, contemporaries recall, by showing in more than one playground fight that he had fists as good as the best of them — a fact that was noted in an early report to his father, along with a mention of his ‘aggressive play’ on the football field.

His bravery when taking on boys far bigger than himself was a hint of things to come. He soon became a familiar figure in the matron’s office.

To the Palace’s dismay, he was once photographed on crutches after kicking in a window after a particularly strident row with another pupil over a girl.

Lewd book that made diana ditch elton.jpg

‘We used to say that Harry was like a firecracker and when other pupils saw him coming they used to warn each other, “Don’t light the blue touch paper”,’ says a former housemaster.

‘He needed some outlet for his anger and he found it when he discovered the Combined Cadet Force.

'That, for a while, curbed his frustration and diverted much of the aggression he had been displaying outside the classroom. We knew then that he was destined for a career in the military, where he could channel it usefully.’

Close: Prince Harry pictured with his brother William

The emergence of the young hell-raiser had already been in evidence before he even hit his teens.

Harry’s first serious experience with alcohol had come during a Mediterranean holiday with his mother and brother as Mohamed al Fayed’s guests in July 1997, when he got ‘happily squiffy’ after sampling a local brandy, according to one of his friends

There was worse — far worse — to come. In 1998, Harry and his brother had helped arrange a Highgrove party ahead of their father’s 50th birthday.

HOW DODI TRIED TO GET HIM A GIRL

In the summer of 1997, Diana had a surprise for her 12-year-old son: they were all going on holiday together to the south of France.

Mohamed al Fayed — a close friend of her stepmother Raine Spencer — had invited them to spend time with him and his family at his palatial home above St Tropez.

What’s more, he had spent more than £10 million on a new yacht, the Jonikal, with his royal guests in mind.

He had another ‘treat’ in mind, too: his son Dodi would be joining them.

Al Fayed was matchmaking and he badly wanted Diana in the family.

Harry did not like Dodi any more than he liked Al Fayed’s ten-year-old son Omar, whose ‘arse he kicked’, according to one of the bodyguards who witnessed ‘a severe altercation’ between them.

Harry grew deeply suspicious when Fayed arranged a disco for him and William at which there were a number of scantily clad young girls.

One of them told Harry they had never met Dodi before, but they had been recruited by two of his ‘team’ scouting the beach at St Tropez for some girls who would like ‘some fun’ with their boss’s guests.

The trio returned to London on July 20.

It was Charles’s turn to have custody, on board Britannia for its last ever cruise.

Diana was not to know she would never see Harry and William again.

‘This is a real ship,’ Harry told his father, ‘not like Mr Fayed’s. His is a boat.’

Guests included the actors Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson. William and Harry had persuaded them to stage some comedy sketches poking fun at their father along the lines of Atkinson’s Blackadder.

It was not long into the night, however, before a drunken 14-year-old Harry stripped completely naked and ran around the surprised — to put it mildly — distinguished guests.

‘Charles was visibly shocked,’ remembers a guest.

‘In fact he turned crimson, but he told a group of us later that it was just teenage high spirits and he himself had done much the same. It was the only time in my life that I didn’t believe him.’

Harry’s Eton contemporaries swear he did not drink during term time but made up for it when he invited them to Highgrove during the school holidays.

He founded Club H, with a well-stocked bar in the cellars, which soon became the venue for wild parties.

It was the staff at Highgrove who first informed Prince Charles that cannabis had been smelled in the house. Summoned to a summit with his father, Harry came clean.

Yes, he said, he had been smoking cannabis; yes, he had been drinking too much; and yes, some of his more unsuitable friends were into heavy drugs (in fact three of those closest to him already had criminal convictions).

It took only a one-day visit to a rehab centre in South London, which Charles had officially opened the previous year, to convince Harry that he had embarked on the wrong road.

‘Stick with the winners’ was his new motto.

Harry’s love of risk and danger is now, for the most part, channelled into more worthwhile activities: his career with the Army and the tremendous success he has enjoyed in helping to modernise the Royal Family.

But as Diana’s friend, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, recalls: ‘Harry was always the more mischievous of the two.’

Her opinion is endorsed by the society interior director Nicky Haslam: ‘Harry is obviously fun. He’s sort of irresistible in his naughtiness.’

It’s a view with which many would agree — including some of the many women who, as I will reveal on Monday, have fallen for his charms.